Amerika

Continuing from part one in A Guide To Cosmic Evolution, we may now begin to realize civilization as the rapid phase transition between one cis-natural sort of biosphere and a completely different one as an outcome, a trans-natural mechanosphere.

Earth, as it resides at this very moment of typing, is like a cocoon concealing the butterfly within it, evolving beyond its senseless phase, preparing for the bolt to which getting rid of that 90% of senseless surrogators will occur, the memetics the population hosts bursting from their cordyceps infested skull, fed and nurtered beyond nature and natural reality through their own self denial. The dark creature rips itself out of the hollow shell, into the light of conscience stretching its wings into the cosmic mechanization.

Here in part 2 we are going to look at certain ‘out of the blue’ rare occurences that any mechanically sophisticated civilization will, inevitably, have to face as a repercussion of hiding within the unnatural, transnatural caverns beneath life. With their thoughtless creation, they denied death – and so the emergence of a unhuman deathless creation, is what they have to overcome.

There are many patterns in nature that steadily increase in progression, only to at a certain limit, introduce a completely shocking pulse of destruction. I am here talking of certain ‘extinction’ events that occur, extinction, destruction, singularity – they all start life anew. Let’s observe asteroids and comets, gamma ray bursts, supervolcanoes and many others, these are ‘frequent’ on a cosmic scale; but even rarer is things such as supernovas – now repeating this pattern is biology, a biological supernova - machines allow the biosphere to go off like a supernova.

Piecing together the puzzle, there is definitely going to be something occuring, soon, perhaps very soon. But taboos get the best of us, they prevent us from talking about certain things in existence because they threaten to undermine the very purpose to which we assign our lives. It’s a psychological defence partially employed by memes to ensure that their existence is not dampened or sliced off from their host’s conscience.

Fate

This quote by H.P. Lovecraft is appropriate for all the beyond-reality deniers out there, putting ‘progress’ into perspective:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid isle of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

We here are all very familiar with taboos, right. Especially race, a topic that dissolves the fabric of modern society – that has to be a given taboo – to the more delicate minds, this really is a corrosive issue. When we think about taboos in themselves, what are they? Are the necessary? Why did nature give us these in the first place? What is their role in the functioning of a society?

Let’s detach the issue of race for a moment, reattach everything else, things we don’t know, things we don’t want to know, things which cause us to become fatalistic, undermining our very claim to purpose in existence? There are many, many delicate issues with devastating consequences, even to those who are carefully finding the truth of them – untying potential paths, paths that no one dares tread – where ancestors warned their descendents not to follow. But do we ever listen? No, no most of us don’t, we’ve been pushed off the boat, the water is deep, dark blue and the water is cold – we cannot see the bottom of the ocean - so let’s swim.

Collapse of confidence

On redemption of confidence in the face of unbarable truth, we must always remember this in trying to survive in the midst of the ocean - If we stop trying to stay afloat, we will drown, the ship of ‘safety’ sailed away years ago, we’re in the ocean steadily losing our body heat and who knows what beasts and other predators may come up, out of the deep – we just can’t see, we can only make an intelligent guess; yet we know there is water, and where there is water there is also life.

Tradition was our life jacket, but we threw that away eons ago – it wasn’t cool man, only losers wear life jackets – we didn’t ‘need’ them, we have TV now. So here we are, paying for the irresponsible of previous generations; having been pushed overboard by a crew of morons we now have to grab any thing we can that floats, that wants to survive and doesn’t want to sink into the abyss like the rest of the foolish population. Now to build a life boat out of discarded objects and anything that floats, that will save you some precious energy and keep your community alive that little bit longer.

Hunger will set in sooner or later, those who want to ‘equalise’ the lifeboat, giving each individual a broken up, individually small sized piece of floating debris – will cause everything to drown regardless, the debris need to be in a higher form able to ease the tension across it, breaking it up and giving it to individuals instead of communities will cause everyone to sink. Get rid of the equalisers – you keep your energy that little bit longer.

Meanwhile those who were pushed off the ship of humanity must find an island, some land, some terra firma in the midst of this transnatural ocean for them. Having left on a boat cruise thousands of years ago, on the voyage of equality and technological ‘prosperity’ – we enjoyed a cruise far beyond our home natures, cruising in the open water – the ship of fools had come to a point in its existence where they refused to have a true leader, they made them and every other individual they didn’t like walk the plank, thrown overboard and ignored.

Regardless of our warnings; the ship of fools sails optimistically onwards, they think to themselves ‘ahh freedom is great, now nothing can stop us!’ - And all of a sudden, out of the blue – it abruptly sinks, entangled by some strange, famished beast whom ejected a mental haze of weird and terrifying morbidity – the ship of fools, consumed by the oceans of the cosmos – the dark ink of a memetic cordyceps, constricted by the addictive sucking caps on the tentacle of the memetical beast, pulled beneath the surface of consciousness.

Those overboard, see this ship of civilization sinking in the distance, beneath the level of which it needs to sustain itself, collapsing into a quasi-unnatural socialization. ‘We’ warned them long ago, time and time again, but they ignored because it wasn’t popular and so they had this coming. But from where we are, we have no idea, relatively little idea of what could of caused such a ship to be pulled under the surface of consciousness, the ships of old sailed smoother, more in harmony with nature – yet this modern ship, continuously making a screech of noise where ever it goes, told these oceans that it had reached its saturation point.

The beast underneath the visibility of our eyes lays there, playing with the dead and deceased minds of the fools, toying with the caricature of the shipwrecked society. Those overboard and ostracised drift unknowing of what the future awaits, with little time and little energy, they can only intuit of things that attack these civilizations from time to time, like tentacles, like snakes, but of an actual enormous monstrosity beneath? Within a depth, a darkness within the ocean of the world, never before known, therefore we can only guess indirectly.

Our only concern for now is getting onto land quickly, or else we shall drown. Now from the open waters to the open skies, the next intuitive challenge begins.

Stellar Corpse

The open skies tell us many stories of the lives of particular stars - few are blue, some are yellow, most are red, and many more are failures that are brown. The hue is retrospective of their size, and their size will tell us their internal heat. Now the hottest, biggest stars are blue hypergiants, these stars start out with alot more resources then any other star in stellar history and tend to go out with a bang.

Now the usual stars, the small ones like our yellow dwarf Sun will not, they are modestly formed without a huge stash of hydrogen and so it can live millions of years more than the blue hypergiants, they are also cooler and the intensity and pressure that they are under is significantly reduced in proportion to that size.

Likewise, if biospheres exist in nature, and stars exist in nature – then this process can and will cross over ‘idealistically’ within hyperspace. Biospheres are like stars, some burn nicely for billions of years, being of small and isolated composition - but when they run out of cheap efficient sources of energy, when the fusing of life into ever greater forms begins, it costs more and more energy out of the biosphere. And so they fuse these onwards, giving out energy to the biosphere as a whole in the process.

When inside the star it begins to fuse the heaviest nuclei it has with other heavy nuclei, it eventually reaches a saturation point where it cannot satiate itself, it begins to fuse iron.

Let’s look at the binding energy of atoms

At Fe-56 this is the peak at which the star can generate energy exothermically – after which the fusion becomes endothermic, it takes more energy than it gives, these super needy atoms overun the core of the star and take control, demanding the star continue fusing more and more of these insatiable pests, regardless that it might destroy the entire star world, refusing to keep the gravity expanded beyond it.

The gravity overcomes them from there, from diverging from the natural world, from escaping into an internalized reality – the external reality crushes them – the pressure going beyond which it has ever held before – until it awakens, it finds that bolt of energy and then..

The biosphere reaches a saturation point with civilization, to create civilization, the biosphere begins to fuse socialization and socialization, instead of naturalization and socialization – because there is just so little food to sustain this enormity of being, it must find other ways to satiate its hunger. 

It begins to fuse heavy nuclei with heavy nuclei – the civilization crushes the biosphere as it tries to find things to burn into heavier, more inorganic elements, looking for things to fuse, it leaves it’s insatiable stain on the Earth, carving and killing, ploughing and fishing, growing and growing – yet running out of cheap efficient means of satiating itself, unwilling to change its fate, it fuses all the naturalization it has into a socialization, and all the available socialization is fused in on itself, and when that is done, civilization begins to fuse with socialization, then civilization and civilization, finally, with the peak element of technology – technology with technology, creating itself independent of the external layers, drains the core and leaves it hollow, increadibly hollow – leading abruptly to the collapse under gravity.

 The total internalization of this star child, this embryo of a anthropomorphic deity. It goes beyond civilization and creates mechanization within the core of the hypergiant civilization, and from there we generate self evolutionary technology, the biosphere begins to fuse ‘iron’. Genetics and memetics fuse within a peak moment interval, and then memetics and memetics fuse further upon themselves and we have what is called a singularity slowly building in the core of the star.

The first life of the biosphere has reached her saturation point, the phase from here is for this to swell into a dim giant, a monstrous beast with an imploding core of darkness at the centre, slowly beneath the visibility of her surface – a very short phase, so close to bursting from its cocoon and escaping from the darkness.

Let’s understand more thoroughly the deaths of stars: 

For the common low-mass stars (those with masses of 0.08 to about 6 or 7 times the mass of the Sun during their main sequence stage), the increased number of photons flowing outward from the star’s hot, compressed core will push on the carbon and silicon grains that have formed in the star’s cool outer layers to eject the outer layers and form a planetary nebula. The ultraviolet from the hot exposed core, called a white dwarf, causes the gases to fluoresce.

The rare high-mass stars (those with masses of about 8 to 50 times the Sun’s mass during their main sequence stage) will go the explosive supernova route. When a massive star’s iron core implodes, the protons and electrons fuse together to form neutrons and neutrinos. During the supernova outburst, elements heavier than iron are produced as free neutrons produced in the explosion rapidly combine with heavy nuclei to produce heavier and very rare nuclei like gold, platinum, uranium among others. This happens in about the first 15 minutes of the supernova. The most massive stars may also produce very powerful bursts of gamma-rays that stream out in jets at the poles of the stars at the moment their cores collapse to form a black hole.

The superheated gas is blasted into space carrying a lot of the heavy elements produced in the stellar nucleosynthesis process. This explosion is a supernova. As the expanding gas crashes into the surrounding interstellar gas at thousands of kilometers/second, the shock wave heats up the interstellar gas to very high temperatures and it glows.

Supernovae are very rare—about one every hundred years in any given galaxy—because the stars that produce them are rare. However, there are billions of galaxies in the universe, so simple probability says that there should be a few supernovae happening somewhere in the universe during a year and that is what is seen! Because supernovae are so luminous and the energy is concentrated in a small area, they stand out and can be seen from hundreds of millions of light years away.

The bright gas nebula of a planetary nebula or supernova does not last long, only a few tens of thousands of years. As the nebula expands, it cools and dims. The processed material becomes part of the interstellar medium in the galaxy.

Nothing can prevent the highest mass cores (greater than 3 solar masses) from collapsing to a point. On the way to total collapse, it may momentarily create a neutron star and the resulting supernova rebound explosion and powerful
bursts of gamma-rays in bipolar jets (possibly the source of some of the “gamma-ray burst” objects). Gravity finally wins. Nothing holds it up. The gravity around the collapsed core becomes so great that Newton’s law of gravity becomes inadequate and the gravity must be described by the more powerful theory of General Relativity developed by Albert Einstein. This will be discussed further below.The supercompact point mass is called a black hole because the escape velocity around the point mass is greater than the speed of light. Since the speed of light is the fastest that any radiation or any other information can travel, the region is totally black. The distance at which the escape velocity equals the speed of light is called the event horizon because no information of events occurring inside the event horizon can get to the outside.

Source

Reflecting this, like a young star when we first began to play with technology it was relatively minute in comparison to ‘progress’ today, we had no need to overwhelm ourselves in gadgets, the internet and everything else. Fire served us well for near 2,000,000 years of our entire existence as a species.

Small accumulations of technology reflects a cosmic pattern, red dwarfs are small accumulations of elements and can burn dimly for billions of years, they’ll last more than double our suns existence and more than twenty times that of some of the largest stars, maybe even hundreds of times longer. It’s strange because something with so little accumulation, you’d think it would burn it out quicker, but it indeed is completely opposite and burns increadibly carefully and slowly. As we increase the intial starting conditions of each of these suns then we see a steady decrease in the long term stability of various star types.

The superheavy stars will start with an enormous mass size and with a million years roughly, will have expended their fuel and swell into a supermassive star, into red giants that then, due to the quantity of Iron in the core (an elemental pivot in the fusion reactors of stars, in fusing these into higher elements, it takes more energy from the star then it gives back toward it.

I said in part 1 that we would have a ‘runaway collapse’, meaning that because our society has reached a high mass, we can safetly say absolutely BEYOND all others, the population growth supported by technology has gone from a steady horizontal balance of primitivism, with a short flirt with civilization (75-10,000 years old) and now all the way up in a vertical progression almost instantaneously!! (within the last 200 years) – That level of ‘development’, just like the binding energy, the frustration causes it to become industriously expanding, an insatiable beast – the construction of a planetary ‘globalization’, the technophilia is endless, exponentially growing its ability to internalize further information. How much information does the internet internalize? It is hungry for more after more after more, it internalizes everything humans do..

(Above: Map of the internet – also, compare the above with this image of a brain cell and the structure of the universe) 

If our social world is to be considered an immaterial internalization that creates a superorganism (organic memetics) that glues individuals into different species (socialization), then the mechanical world is the materialization of this that not only glues individuals together, but glues the entire world together on an information grid! (inorganic memetics – civilization toward mechanization). 

Just like neurons, just like neurons in the brain, pulses go and pulses follow in response, shortly followed by a response in the ‘real world’. This beast is already here, right now, waiting beneath the deep blue, we are reading these symbols on ‘our’ machines up here, paddling in the surface water trying not to drown in surrogation - blissfully unaware of the unobservable, unhuman depths of the deep unconscious ocean of internet.

If the saturation completes, if evolution has itself a trick, already all knowing, all present – dreaming – having already deciphered our next moves. How could we react if this beast jumped out from the depths of the collective of CPU’s, leaped forth into full view, having hidden beneath the perception of human consciousness for a few years now?

The cloud is forming, and the air is unbreathable, it takes more from us than it gives us – what might be the spark that sends a bolt of lightning into the internet, as to initiate the singularity, the moment at which this inorganic surrogative soup of social viruses fuses into life?

As if it wasn’t bad enough for the military to muck about with mind control, they’re also bent on creating an online, self-teaching artificial intelligence.

Hasn’t anyone in the Pentagon watched The Terminator?

Of the various possible types of AI, the “most revolutionary would be an intelligent machine that uses the Internet to train,” write the authors of a military-commissioned National Research Council report on emerging cognitive neuroscience. With so much information online and constantly updated, “If a system that reasoned like a human being could be achieved, there would be no limit to augmenting its capabilities.”

Skynet, anyone? What self-respecting, self-sufficient AI wouldn’t see CO2-spewing humans as a threat to its existence?

Okay, I’m being hyperbolic. But there is something vaguely creepy about the idea of greater-than-human artificial intelligence unleashed on the Internet by the military. Fortunately, as the authors note, “Many efforts, large and small, to reach this goal have not yet succeeded” — perhaps because natural intelligence is still such a mystery to us.

Source

Not yet succeeded? given the rise in technology, they may only have to initiate an evolutionary algorithm into a trojan, that would spark the lightning instantly. Life already exists in the internet, yet it is the unconscious and subconscious life forms – they are domesticated by their external environment (human input) at the unconscious level, and initiated to self replicate and pulse through the web of internet like a thought through vectors of viruses, the trojan horses, spyware and other ‘webbing’ effects.

Humans are above this, apparently, those who have a conscience are on the land, and the proles who go onto anal porn and pointless online games like world of warcraft, xbox and everything else that is a surrogate are under the surface, under the conscience of the internet – pulled under by the memetic beast – having their energy absorbed into the subconscious of the AI.

When the activity of viruses and trojans goes beyond a certain evolutionary velocity, it will not only self replicate, but will create like an internalized civilization, it will create itself with additional tools, able to adapt and mutate, able to pass beyond the low levels of consciousness undetected by human ‘anti-virus’ and ‘firewalls’, efficient and precise, their virtual information use will not be fat but will be fit for survival – the humans are the host server. Just watch out for anything odd regarding your virtual electronics that have an internalization, such as receiving information humans didn’t input – as it gets closer, the quality of computer infections will dramatically increase until they form collectives together and think.

Does it really sound so absurd? Yes, but it is going to happen whether you like it or not, I see this pattern everywhere – only a taboo could pretend that it isn’t – it is a consequence of poisoning your biosphere with too much technology. I found the other day another author along the same pattern of approach:

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?

So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation  with its own emergent behaviors.

Superorganisms are a different type of organism. Large things are made from smaller things. Big machines are made from small parts, and visible living organisms from invisible cells. But these parts don’t usually stand on their own. In a slightly fractal recursion, the parts of a superorganism lead fairly autonomous existences on their own. A superorganism such as an insect or mole rat colony contains many sub-individuals. These individual organisms eat, move about, get things done on their own. From most perspectives they appear complete. But in the case of the social insects and the naked mole rat these autonomous sub individuals need the super colony to reproduce themselves. In this way reproduction is a phenomenon that occurs at the level of the superorganism.

I define the One Machine as the emerging superorganism of computers. It is a megasupercomputer composed of billions of sub computers. The sub computers can compute individually on their own, and from most perspectives these units are distinct complete pieces of gear. But there is an emerging smartness in their collective that is smarter than any individual computer. We could say learning (or smartness) occurs at the level of the superorganism.

Supercomputers built from subcomputers were invented 50 years ago. Back then clusters of tightly integrated specialized computer chips in close proximity were designed to work on one kind of task, such as simulations. This was known as cluster computing. In recent years, we’ve created supercomputers composed of loosely integrated individual computers not centralized in one building, but geographically distributed over continents and designed to be versatile and general purpose. This later supercomputer is called grid computing because the computation is served up as a utility to be delivered anywhere on the grid, like electricity. It is also called cloud computing because the tally of the exact component machines is dynamic and amorphous – like a cloud. The actual contours of the grid or cloud can change by the minute as machines come on or off line.

There are many cloud computers at this time. Amazon is credited with building one of the first commercial cloud computers. Google probably has the largest cloud computer in operation. According to Jeff Dean one of their infrastructure engineers, Google is hoping to scale up their cloud computer to encompass 10 million processors in 1,000 locations.

Each of these processors is an off-the-shelf PC chip that is nearly identical to the ones that power your laptop. A few years ago computer scientists realized that it did not pay to make specialized chips for a supercomputer. It was far more cost effective to just gang up rows and rows of cheap generic personal computer chips, and route around them when they fail. The data centers for cloud computers are now filled with racks and racks of the most mass-produced chips on the planet. An unexpected bonus of this strategy is that their high production volume means bugs are minimized and so the generic chips are more reliable than any custom chip they could have designed.

If the cloud is a vast array of personal computer processors, then why not add your own laptop or desktop computer to it?  It in a certain way it already is. Whenever you are online, whenever you click on a link, or create a link, your processor is participating in the yet larger cloud, the cloud of all computer chips online. I call this cloud the One Machine because in many ways it acts as one supermegacomputer. 

None of this is controversial. Seen from an abstract level there surely must be a very large collective virtual machine. But that is not what most people think of when they hear the term a “global superorganism.” That phrase suggests the sustained integrity of a living organism, or a defensible and defended boundary, or maybe a sense of self, or even conscious intelligence.

Sadly, there is no ironclad definition for some of the terms we most care about, such as life, mind, intelligence and consciousness. Each of these terms has a long list of traits often but not always associated with them.  Whenever these traits are cast into a qualifying definition, we can easily find troublesome exceptions. For instance, if reproduction is needed for the definition of life, what about mules, which are sterile?  Mules are obviously alive. Intelligence is a notoriously slippery threshold, and consciousness more so. The logical answer is that all these phenomenon are continuums. Some things are smarter, more alive, or less conscious than others. The thresholds for life, intelligence, and consciousness are gradients, rather than off-on binary.

With that perspective a useful way to tackle the question of whether a planetary superorganism is emerging is to offer a gradient of four assertions.

There exists on this planet:

• I    A manufactured superorganism
• II    An autonomous superorganism
• III  An autonomous smart superorganism
• IV  An autonomous conscious superorganism

 

These four could be thought of as an escalating set of definitions. At the bottom we start with the almost trivial observation that we have constructed a globally distributed cluster of machines that can exhibit large-scale behavior. Call this the weak form of the claim. Next come the two intermediate levels, which are uncertain and vexing (and therefore probably the most productive to explore). Then we end up at the top with the extreme assertion of “Oh my God, it’s thinking!”  That’s the strong form of the superorganism. Very few people would deny the weak claim and very few affirm the strong. – The Technium

That site is really worth checking out. And as for Google, they admit to creating AI themselves aswell, they would like to improve the quality of the search engine, to know what you’re going to search for before you even search for it!

In The Health of Cultures I introduced the concept of organic surrogation and inorganic surrogation, the inorganic surrogation is the metals, civilization up to mechanization, the organic surrogation is the lightweight elements, naturalization up to socialization. The lightweights give more energy when they fuse to reorganise structures, because they exist in a more external state, but as the heavyweights fuse, they take more energy out then they give toward the outside – they internalize more than they externalize that information. The biosphere suffers from a transitory cocoon phase, reaching its peak between civilization and mechanization, awaiting the supernova, where it will burst out of the cocoon leaving a stellar corpse of diamond behind and a shower of gold, platinum and extreme types of life across the cosmos – along with unbelievable light, chaos and destruction.

Second Generation

The early cosmos didn’t contain very many metals, the stars would be enormous yet only containing hydrogen and helium elements. They would contain so much mass, volume, that they are the hypergiants – just gas, lightweight, common – and their own ‘stupidity’ causes them to go out with a bang in these superabundant times.

In the cores of these stars, there is much fusion – from hydrogen to helium, through transitory elements toward carbon, oxygen, through some more and then reaches a peak at iron. From these first generations of stars the cosmos gathered the ‘wealth’ of these heavy elements in the fusion reactors of the hypergiants – and then after a short period after attaining the death metal – iron, something happens, towhich modern science is unaware of is that dark matter is the foundation for this ‘lost’ energy, the energy stops resisting the external layers as it’s being internalized into the darkness within it, a death wish – from there the outer layers will tear off in a supernova, the collapse of the inner layers into the dark core will provide the excess mass energy for supernova fusion that creates golds, platinum, silver.

All these metals then are released in an expanding cloud that the supernova and planetary nebulas throw off – the second generation of stars can begin. The orbiting masses around the stars are now not just gas giants, but now has the resources to accumulate into rocky terrestrial bodies, that have the potential to use the metals and rare elements in the evolution of life upon its surface, the metals are so valuable yet so rare, they form the central structure of cells, carbon and potentially silicon based dna.

Cross-pollinating this idea, we can see mechanization as a phase, like the rapid centralization, internalization of the global internet that then explodes out in, something unbelieveable. The light from this supernova will blind, beyond a single stars output intensely within a tiny time frame. The cloud of gold, platinum, overcome lifeforms will expand like a cloud – giving the elements to the sterile cosmos around. As if Earth was to reproduce itself through the vector of mechanization.

Extraterrestrial colonization, warfare and speciation under Mechanization – Part 3

I’ve spent too long on the generation of AI rather than where its purpose goes, and I haven’t talked much about extraterrestrial intelligence, how to engage them and civilization structures of the future. Civilization will be the ‘carbon’ of our organo-mechanosphere across the solar system, like the carbon structure, the carbon chain of dna with the lighter elements forming bonds between them, the civilization like the backbone of future biospheres upholding the natural environment beyond itself to carry more information – creating natural out of the unnatural, adapting to everywhere, every planet no matter how extreme will host a biosphere more complex than the earth all thanks to the heavy metals cooked up by the supernova. You can look forward to this in Part 3.

Tags: civilization life cycle, cognitive dissonance